Lenin’s important work, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, is a pamphlet written in 1918, responding to a pamphlet by the principal leader of the Second International, Karl Kautsky, entitled The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. 

The purpose of Marxist analysis is so that we can know how to make revolution, so that we understand the terrain of struggle, formulate correct strategy and tactics, and identify our friends and enemies. We must understand the contradictions at work in society and unite all who can be united if we want to win. So, we need to be very careful and precise in that analysis.

Lenin’s important book, “Left Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder, was written in 1920. According to the subtitle of the original manuscript, it was intended to be “a popular exposition on Marxist strategy and tactics.” After the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917, the working class in the former Russian Empire had smashed its chains and set out on the road to socialism. Revolutionaries all over the world were eager to understand how the Bolsheviks had succeeded in defeating Tsarism and imperialism. Lenin, therefore, wrote this book to help guide the international communist movement and to sum up some of the critical lessons of the revolution in Russia.  

Five Essays on Philosophy collects five important essays on dialectical materialism and Marxist epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, by Mao Zedong. It includes the articles “On Practice” and “On Contradiction” as well as “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” “Speech at the Chinese Communist Party's National Conference on Propaganda Work,” and “Where do Correct Ideas Come From?” 

The Foundations of Leninism is a collection of lectures given by J.V. Stalin to Sverdlov University in 1924, shortly after the death of Lenin in January of that year. The nine lectures that make up the book cover topics of history, methodology, style of work, theory, and strategy and tactics, as well as exposition and analysis of particular issues, such as the party, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the national question, and the peasant question. On each of these topics, Stalin lays out the Leninist position succinctly and concretely. 

When the first World War broke out in 1914, it threw the socialist movement into disarray. Within the Second International, socialist leaders from all over the world disagreed on how to analyze the causes of the war and the way forward. According to Vladimir I. Lenin: A Political Biography by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, “On the very outbreak of the war he set to work to make a profound and detailed study of the world literature on the economics, methods of production, history, geography, politics, diplomacy, the working class movement, the colonial question, and other spheres of social life in the different countries in the epoch of imperialism.” These Notebooks on Imperialism, over 600 pages of copious research, make up Volume 39 of his Collected Works. The Institute notes, “The fruit of this vast work of research was Lenin’s famous book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Completed in June 1916, this book is one of the greatest works in Marxist-Leninist literature.”

In 1848 a great revolutionary upsurge spread through Europe. These revolutions swept through Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, Ireland and other parts of Europe. By and large, these were democratic revolutions against feudalism, waged by the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie and the working class. In the midst of this wave of revolution, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels joined the underground German Communist League. Marx and Engels were tasked with writing the program of the Communist League, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, a document that would explain the organization's analysis of the situation and its plan for how to move from that situation to revolution and socialism. 

Vladimir Lenin was the great leader of the Bolshevik Revolution that overthrew tsarism and capitalism in Russia and built a new socialist society, for the first time in history. His book The State and Revolution is one of his greatest contributions to Marxist theory and is a cornerstone of Leninism.

Karl Marx is best known in the realm of political economy for his great work, Capital. Marx is the original theorist, together with his associate Friedrich Engels, of scientific socialism. Marx wrote Capital in order to expose the inner workings of capitalism, so that workers could understand the system behind their exploitation, how this system arose historically, and the laws of motion inherent within it.

Today we are launching a new series on Marxist-Leninist theory, focusing on important texts from the principal theorists of Marxism-Leninism: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. In these short reviews, we will look briefly at the historical context of the text, we will break down the main argument and points, and we will talk about how the text remains relevant and applicable to revolutionaries today. We will begin with Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, by Friedrich Engels.